"This is a slam-dunk tier-one partnership for us, " says Sun Chief Executive Scott McNealy.
And if it succeeds, it could become the PC-killer that McNealy has long sought.
Most of Mr McNealy's irreverent humour is directed at Microsoft, which he trashes at every opportunity.
That's joyful news from Bill Joy, the Sun guru whom McNealy credits with bringing Jini to fruition.
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"Most customers don't trust equipment manufacturers to be open about integration, " says Sun Chief Scott McNealy .
Now scientists at Sun Labs have come-up with a device that could bring McNealy's vision to life.
Scott McNealy (founding CEO of Sun Microsystems) is said to be starting a new company in Colorado.
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"This is a slam-dunk tier-one partnership for us, " says Scott McNealy, Sun's CEO.
Perhaps that is why in the end Mr McNealy could not quite stop himself from mentioning Microsoft after all.
Like Oracle's Larry Ellison, Sun's boss, Scott McNealy, is ready to put his money where his not inconsiderable mouth is.
McNealy as a rule does not take part in these conference calls, which usually are scheduled during regular trading hours.
He also admires the personalities who currently lead it: Larry Ellison of Oracle, Scott McNealy at SunMicrosystems and Apple's Steve Jobs.
Rejected once, and then again, by business schools at Stanford and Harvard, Scott McNealy practiced the perseverance that would characterize his career.
In part, by being much more pragmatic about alliances and technological combinations than was Mr McNealy, who harboured emotional enmities with rivals.
Mr Schmidt did say he was looking forward to "exploring other related areas of collaboration", and Mr McNealy said "we expect more".
For years McNealy held Sun together seemingly by loud remarks and spitballs.
No wonder, McNealy and his cohorts want to keep Corona a secret.
Sun's chairman and chief executive, Scott McNealy , is to participate in the call, which will be held after the closing bell.
Sun Microsystems' McNealy also came in to talk about SuperHome.net, a venture to bring the Internet to the day-to-day running of a home.
" Sun Microsystems Chief Scott McNealy "will be one of those guys who tries to hang on, " but "the business model doesn't work.
McNealy was a few minutes late, so I looked out the window and watched him swing his dark blue Cadillac Seville into the parking lot.
Mr McNealy's audience took that with a generous pinch of salt.
At a Wall Street analysts' conference last week, Sun Chief Executive Scott McNealy warned that SCO would likely try to assert its IP rights against Linux.
Against this backdrop I dropped by to see McNealy at his Palo Alto offices on Oct. 2 and chat about how he's leading Sun in rough times.
McNealy believes the roles of key tech companies like Google, Intel, NVIDIA and Qualcomm are more important than they were 10 years ago, when there were only game consoles and PCs for gaming.
"There was plenty of speculation Zynga was getting referrals within the Facebook community that other gaming companies weren't getting which helped drive web traffic to Zynga games, " Digital World Research chief executive PJ McNealy said.
"The number of viable platforms for consuming media such as games has exploded, and the tech infrastructure companies now need to be more agile, more responsive, and more diversified than any other point in their histories, " McNealy said.
Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy , along with Ed Zander , president and COO, and Michael Lehman , vice president of corporate resources and CFO, will be in the hot seat while they give Wall Street a heads up on how Sun's business is weathering the slowing economy.
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